Franklin Knight Lane

Lane, Franklin Knight, 1864–1921, U.S. Secretary of the Interior (1913–20), b. near Charlottetown, P.E.I., Canada. Raised in California, he later studied law and practiced in San Francisco, where he entered Democratic politics and served as city and county attorney. His unsuccessful campaigns for governor of California (1902) and mayor of San Francisco (1903) won national attention, and in 1905, President Theodore Roosevelt appointed him to the Interstate Commerce Commission, on which he sat until 1913, serving briefly as chairman in 1913. As Secretary of the Interior under President Wilson, he was a conservationist. He sought to increase the independence of the Native Americans. He promoted self-government in Alaska and sponsored the Alaska RR from Seward to Fairbanks to tap the interior.

See his letters (ed. by his wife, Anne W. Lane, and L. H. Wall, 1922).